—There’s no doubt about it, he said.
—Howyeh, Father.
—The men of your generation are made of stronger stuff, he said.
I closed my eyes. He was gone when I opened them. The chair was gone too.
He came again, another day. I was sitting up, on the mend. Sore where I’d never felt pain. This time I saw the young nun deliver the chair, and I watched him let her drag it till it was right behind him, so he could sit back safely without breaking his arse. He didn’t thank or even look at her.
—You’re a brave man, he said.
—I was only walking down the fuckin’ street, Father, I told him. He looked at me, hard. He didn’t move, but he was shoving me back into my box. And I went; he was my boss.
—You’re a stoic, Henry, he said.
—Thank you, Father.
—You know what a stoic is.
—I do, yeah.
I wanted to go home.
—And it’s nice of you to call me one, I told him.
—You’ve read the papers.
—No.
—No?
—I’ve been sleeping a lot.
—Recuperating.
—That’s right, Father.
—Good man, he said.—You spoke to a little girl between your naps.
—She wasn’t that little, Father.
—She gave you a great write-up, he said.—All your deeds of derring-do.
I had to listen carefully. I’d been drugged to fuck - I suddenly knew it. I still was. I’d been knocking back every pill they’d given me.
—There are people outside who can’t wait to meet you, he said.
I wanted to drift - I didn’t want to face this. What was he telling me?
—Friends, he said.
—Old friends? I asked.
—New friends.
I didn’t want to meet the old friends, even though the times had changed and nobody wanted me dead - except the fuckers who’d planted the bomb. That was something I suddenly realised: I hadn’t thought about them at all. Not since I’d been lifted into the ambulance.
New friends.
What had I told her? Everything - I thought I had. My entire life and times.
I had to be careful.
—Did I say anything I shouldn’t have, Father?
—Nothing substantial, he said.—There was mention of a married woman who helped you hide from the foe.
—Annie.
—That’s right. And a piano.
—Sorry.
—She was off the page for the late edition.
—Who managed that?
—Your new friends.
—Why?
—You’re a hero, Henry. But you’re tired. I’ll leave you to it.
He stood.
—One thing, Father.
—Go on.
—It’s a blunt question.
—The right ones often are, he said.
He fuckin’ loved himself.
I looked straight at him.
—Do you think I’ll be shot when I leave here?
He looked at me.
—No, he said.—Why would you be?
The bus strike was over by the time I left. I know this, because I was on the bus.
I’d braced myself for something different. A small crowd, a quick burst of clapping as I came down the hospital steps. Some of the new friends the priest had mentioned, or the priest himself, his car door open for me. The odd photographer, and women with jotters. But there was no one.
I don’t know any of this.
I’ve no memory of leaving the hospital, or the moment when I knew I was being discharged. I still don’t know which hospital I was in, or if there were steps at the front door. But I was going home on the bus. I was wearing a suit that fitted me but wasn’t mine. I’d seen the old suit, already in bits and smoking, being cut away from me with big silver scissors. I’d watched as the scissors went straight up the full leg, cut through the waistband without any extra effort, and moved on up the jacket, to the shoulders. I’d stared at the hand holding the scissors. I was on my back, on a trolley, right under heavy light. But my head was propped up, pillows under my shoulders, to dam the bleeding I couldn’t see or feel.
I must have walked to the bus stop. I must have known the way. I wasn’t worried - this wasn’t new. And neither was the leg. I’d known that when I’d picked it up, to strap it on a week before, when I’d been ready to stand and go for my first piss since the bomb. It was the same leg I’d brought with me from America, polished up and cleaned, a lovely job. Someone must have gone looking for it, must have crawled across smoking rubble to find it for me - the same way I’d searched for my father’s leg after I’d escaped from Richmond Barracks in 1916. Who had done that? I didn’t really care. It was my leg and I wouldn’t have to learn how to walk all over again. I’d have missed the creaking feel of the straps, and the weight of the leg itself - every bit of me knew it off by heart. I was able to stroll to the jacks.
And I saw myself in the mirror. I looked at the ghost of the damage that must have nearly killed me. There were three thin gashes that ran into my hair. There was bruising, calm now, down the length of one side of my face. And a general swelling, still just there - I turned my head; the profile of a slightly different man. But, fuck it, the damage suited me. I was going out a better-looking man.
I thumped my chest, and knew that there was more. Beneath the striped pyjamas. I unbuttoned them slowly, and saw what I’d missed. Raw red and yellow blots, across my chest and stomach. The heat had threatened, but it hadn’t burnt too badly. I was getting away with the warning, and a shaved chest. I was slower going back to the bed. I was in pain for the first real time since the bomb.
My alligator boot was under the bed - the boot I’d left in the wreckage, with the leg. It had been polished too, and looked fresher than it had when the alligator had owned it. It made the other one look dull and ordinary, the skin of a local animal. I looked at them now, downstairs on the bus. I was wearing odd boots. I’d work on the dull one when I got home. I’d exhaust myself doing it.
I had no key, and no idea where it was. In the gutter on Talbot Street, in a box back at the hospital - which hospital? - I hadn’t a clue. I went through my pockets again. I’d the remains of a fiver, and nothing else.
But I knew: I was being looked after. And for some reason - no reason - it didn’t scare me.
I went to the back door of the priest’s house. The housekeeper gave me a house key, newly cut, and the pay I was due for the week I’d worked before the bomb. There was no money for the time in hospital; I didn’t ask about it. The priest wasn’t my landlord but he had the key to my house. I didn’t ask about that either. She handed me the fistful of school keys too.
—You’re glad to be back, I’d say, she said.—Are you?
—I am, yeah.
—Out of that place.
—Yeah.
It was the first real time she’d spoken to me.
—I hate those hospitals, I do, she said.
—Ah, sure.
—And I seen you in the paper.
—Did you?
She was a Dublin woman, and that seemed unusual. The priest’s housekeeper should have been a culchie, a peasant, bred to be a slave. I wondered was he riding her. I guessed he was - there was something too meaty about him - but I didn’t care. She was a skinny thing, standing there, trying hard - too late - to be nice.
—Yeah, she said.—I read all about you.
—Was there a picture?
—There was, yeah. You in the bed.
She was looking down at my legs, trying to guess which was the wooden one. I gave her no help.
—And there was an old one, she said.
—Old one?
—You, out in 1916, she said.—In your uniform and all. A handsome young lad.
—Which paper? I asked.
There was no photograph of me in 1916. I’d been cut out of the only photograph.
—Father’s
Independent
, she said.
—You don’t still have it, do you?
—It might be in Father’s office, she said.
—Any chance—?
—I can’t go in there. It’s locked.
—Grand, I said.
I wasn’t going to charm her; I wasn’t going to try. I wanted to get home.
—It’s Father’s golf day, she said.
From another woman, that might have been an invitation. I’d have been up that step in an oul’ lad’s flash. But this was the priest’s housekeeper. I wasn’t going to mess with the boss’s secret missis. Even if she was looking better than she had been a minute or two before.
—He got a good day for it, I said.
—He plays off ten.
She didn’t know what that meant, and neither did I. She was trying to lure me into the kitchen, to take her into the stuffy dark of Father’s office. She’d find the key - I’d wear his slippers. I was seventy-two; she was a girl in her forties. She was looking at the man who’d been in the G.P.O.
—Good for him, I said.—I’ll be seeing you.
I went down the deep step, put there to prove I was a cripple. But I was fine; I kept my hands in my pockets. I went around to the front of the house. There were no eyes holding me up now, so I was dog tired, exhausted. But I made it down the hill. The new key worked, and there was fresh bread and milk on the table, and a packet of Wholegrain.
I was being looked after.
There was a copy of the
Irish Independent
. It was open, folded, on page 9 - an old, grainy photograph of a skinny kid in a Volunteer uniform, standing out in his parents’ back garden. It wasn’t me, and it was the wrong uniform. I was still right. I’d been sliced out of the only photograph.
I slept all night; I didn’t dream.
I went to work. It was the last week before the summer holidays.
—Good man, Henry, said Strickland.—You’re back from the wars.
I shrugged, and smiled.
—That was a dreadful thing, he said.
—It was, yeah. Terrible.
—I should have been in to see you.
—You’re grand, I said.
—Father Devine said you didn’t need visitors, he said.—But you’re alright?
—I am, yeah, I said.—I’m grand.
And I was. I was a bit stiff, but I was grand. And I knew why. The secret was out. I was Henry Smart again. I was side by side with the boy I’d been in the G.P.O. People knew what I’d been and what I’d done. They looked at me and saw their country.
The kids in the yard played near to me.
—I’m Henry.
—No, I am!
—Fuck off, you. It’s my turn.
They played 1916, a yard full of Henrys knocking fuck out of the British.They fell dead.They got up and died again.They wanted me to see it, their readiness to die for Ireland. To shoot a gun, to die and live, forever.
The teachers knew they’d been right all along. They grew as they came up to me. They nearly fuckin’ saluted. One of them definitely genuflected. He kept going and pulled his socks up while he was down there.
I saw Strickland looking, trying to figure me out. Why wasn’t I in the Dáil, a shadow minister, the father of the opposition? (There was a coalition of Labour and the Blueshirts in power in 1974.) Or an old diehard, a last link to the country’s birth and death, living up a country lane where the electricity hadn’t gone, or in a flat in Ballymun, refusing the respectability that could have been my due? He knew his history - why hadn’t he known about me? Why was one of the country’s heroes the caretaker of his school? No one liked questions they couldn’t answer, and there was a line of the things waiting in the corridor every time he opened his door. He kept a new distance. He didn’t stop to chat.
Women kept their distance too, but it was different. They looked at me in a way that hadn’t been familiar for a long time. They stared at the man I’d been, and they could see some of him in my current features. They were curious, but it was more. I made sense now - the scars, and the leg. I was Celtic mythology walking towards them. I was fuckin’ biblical. I was the quiet man, and suddenly a fine man. The women smiled.
I was being looked after.
9
The smile was big, but controlled. Everything about him was under tight control. The beard, the eyes. The teeth were perfect, too big and even.
Whoever grabbed hold of me just kept going, pushed me ahead.
I’d been locking up the school, hauling myself upright after bending at the keyhole. There was the pain, tangled and old, across my shoulders. I took my time, breaking through the ache. I was nearly there, when the blow came and I was being brought across the yard. By a strong man. I wasn’t given the time to turn and face him. But he wasn’t being brutal.
And he wasn’t trying to hide himself.
—There’s a man wants to meet you, Henry, he said.—Sorry about the drama.
I knew who was shoving me towards the van that had now appeared at the mouth of the yard. It was McCauley, the man who’d taught the scholarship boys before they’d brought in the free secondary education. It was mad McCauley, but he was suddenly someone else.
The back door of the van swung open. I didn’t fight or try to. There was more strength in the fist holding my jacket than I’d have been able to manage. The door kept swinging my way, but McCauley didn’t slow me down or help me dodge it. I walked right into its swinging path. It caught me, and hurt.
—Sorry, Henry.
I shut my eyes against the pain - more fuckin’ pain - and felt the hood go over my head. Warm cotton, a pillow or something; it wasn’t clean. I vomited. A hard hand pushed my head down, as McCauley kept shoving me into the van. I fell in, onto my stomach - I didn’t have time to use my hands - and I was pulled and pushed the rest of the way, across a metal floor that stank of rust and oil.
—Sorry about this.
It wasn’t McCauley who spoke this time. Someone put a knee on my back. His feet were huge, right at my face. He was climbing over me, to pull the door closed - I thought. The van was moving - it had started while I was being dragged into it. I felt it turn left when it got to the front gate. The knees and weight were off my back. A hand took one of mine, and guided it to some sort of handle or grip. I held on as the van took quick corners - I lost count; I never started - and then got going on a straight stretch of road.